Laurel grabbed his shoulder.
“You know something!” she said. Her voice was strained and tense. “I can see that you do. Let the rest of us in on it, why don’t you?”
He hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m not prepared to say right now, Laurel. I want to go inside and look around first.”
With that they had to be content. Brian and Albert pushed the ladder back into position. One of the supporting struts had buckled slightly, and Brian held it as they ascended one by one. He himself came last, walking on the side of the ladder away from the buckled strut. The others had waited for him, and they walked up the jetway and into the terminal together.
They found themselves in a large, round room with boarding gates located at intervals along the single curving wall. The rows of seats stood ghostly and deserted, the overhead fluorescents were dark squares, but here Albert thought he could almost smell other people... as if they had all trooped out only seconds before the Flight 29 survivors emerged from the jetway.
From outside, that choral humming continued to swell, approaching like a slow invisible wave: — aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
“Come with me,” Bob Jenkins said, taking effortless charge of the group. “Quickly, please.”
He set off toward the concourse and the others fell into line behind him, Albert and Bethany walking together with arms linked about each others’ waists. Once off the carpeted surface of the United boarding lounge and in the concourse itself, their heels clicked and echoed, as if there were two dozen of them instead of only six. They passed dim, dark advertising posters on the walls: Watch CNN, Smoke Marlboros, Drive Hertz, Read Newsweek, See Disneyland.
And that sound, that open-throated choral humming sound, continued to grow. Outside, Laurel had been convinced the sound had been approaching them from the west. Now it seemed to be right in here with them, as though the singers — if they were singers — had already arrived. The sound did not frighten her, exactly, but it made the flesh of her arms and back prickle with awe.
They reached a cafeteria-style restaurant, and Bob led them inside. Without pausing, he went around the counter and took a wrapped pastry from a pile of them on the counter. He tried to tear it open with his teeth... then realized his teeth were back on the plane. He made a small, disgusted sound and tossed it over the counter to Albert.
“You do it,” he said. His eyes were glowing now. “Quickly, Albert! Quickly!”
“Quick, Watson, the game’s afoot!” Albert said, and laughed crazily. He tore open the cellophane and looked at Bob, who nodded. Albert took out the pastry and bit into it. Cream and raspberry jam squirted out the sides. Albert grinned. “Ith delicious!” he said in a muffled voice, spraying crumbs as he spoke. “Delicious!” He offered it to Bethany, who took an even larger bite.
Laurel could smell the raspberry filling, and her stomach made a goinging, boinging sound. She laughed. Suddenly she felt giddy, joyful, almost stoned. The cobwebs from the depressurization experience were entirely gone; her head felt like an upstairs room after a fresh sea breeze had blown in on a hot and horrible muggy afternoon. She thought of Nick, who wasn’t here, who had died so the rest of them could be here, and thought that Nick would not have minded her feeling this way.
The choral sound continued to swell, a sound with no direction at all, a sourceless, singing sigh that existed all around them:
— AAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Bob Jenkins raced back around the counter, cutting the corner by the cash register so tightly that his feet almost flew out from beneath him and he had to grab the condiments trolley to keep from falling. He stayed up but the stainless-steel trolley fell over with a gorgeous, resounding crash, spraying plastic cutlery and little packets of mustard, ketchup, and relish everywhere.
“Quickly!” he cried. “We can’t be here! It’s going to happen soon — at any moment, I believe — and we can’t be here when it does! I don’t think it’s safe!”
“What isn’t sa—” Bethany began, but then Albert put his arm around her shoulders and hustled her after Bob, a lunatic tour-guide who had already bolted for the cafeteria door.
They ran out, following him as he dashed for the United boarding lobby again. Now the echoing rattle of their footfalls was almost lost in the powerful hum which filled the deserted terminal, echoing and reechoing in the many throats of its spoked corridors.
Brian could hear that single vast vote beginning to break up. It was not shattering, not even really changing, he thought, but focussing, the way the sound of the langoliers had focussed as they approached Bangor.
As they re-entered the boarding lounge, he saw an ethereal light begin to skate over the empty chairs, the dark ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES TV monitors and the boarding desks. Red followed blue; yellow followed red; green followed yellow. Some rich and exotic expectation seemed to fill the air. A shiver chased through him; he felt all his body-hair stir and try to stand up. A clear assurance filled him like a morning sunray: We are on the verge of something — some great and amazing thing.
“Over here!” Bob shouted. He led them toward the wall beside the jetway through which they had entered. This was a passengers-only area, guarded by a red velvet rope. Bob jumped it as easily as the high-school hurdler he might once have been. “Against the wall!”
“Up against the wall, motherfuckers!” Albert cried through a spasm of sudden, uncontrollable laughter.
He and the rest joined Bob, pressing against the wall like suspects in a police line-up. In the deserted circular lounge which now lay before them, the colors flared for a moment... and then began to fade out. The sound, however, continued to deepen and become more real. Brian thought he could now hear voices in that sound, and footsteps, even a few fussing babies.
“I don’t know what it is, but it’s wonderful!” Laurel cried. She was halflaughing, half-weeping. “I love it!”
“I hope we’re safe here,” Bob said. He had to raise his voice to be heard. “I think we will be. We’re out of the main traffic areas.”
“What’s going to happen?” Brian asked. “What do you know?”
“When we went through the time-rip headed cast, we travelled back in time!” Bob shouted. “We went into the past! Perhaps as little as fifteen minutes... do you remember me telling you that?”
Brian nodded, and Albert’s face suddenly lit up.
“This time it brought us into the future!” Albert cried. “That’s it, isn’t it? This time the rip brought us into the future!”
“I believe so, yes!” Bob yelled back. He was grinning helplessly. “And instead of arriving in a dead world — a world which had moved on without us — we have arrived in a world waiting to be born! A world as fresh and new as a rose on the verge of opening! That is what is happening now, I believe. That is what we hear, and what we sense... what has filled us with such marvellous, helpless joy. I believe we are about to see and experience something which no living man or woman has ever witnessed before. We have seen the death of the world; now I believe we are going to see it born. I believe that the present is on the verge of catching up to us.”
As the colors had flared and faded, so now the deep, reverberating quality of the sound suddenly dropped. At the same time, the voices which had been within it grew louder, clearer. Laurel realized she could make out words, even whole phrases.
“—have to call her before she decides—”
“—I really don’t think the option is a viable—”
“—home and dry if we can just turn this thing over to the parent company—”